Chapter 27
After Vivi changed out of her áo dài, she rented a motorbike and took an ungainly ride through the outskirts of the town, losing her way and her internet reception.
She had a vague directional sense of the Old House from where Ki`êu had indicated on the map and followed it by memory and instinct, both of which failed her. Twice, she circled the same formation
of straight-spined palmyras.
Finally, she arrived at an opening in a thicket that led to a layer of dense understory. A beaten path soon melted into spindles
of teak. She left the motorbike behind and went on foot. Arrow-shaped morning glory sprang in low tangles, an army of it.
She snagged her shoe on a patch and flew onto the ground, caking her clothes and skin in mud. Sediment coated her tongue.
She spat it out and picked herself up.
As Vivi trudged deeper into the thicket, annoyance grew in her. The birdcalls had a taunting lilt to them. The day, previously
so glowing, now took on a wan and sickly quality. Each path bled into the next, interlocked Mobius strips of green and brown.
Sweat and dirt worked an alliance that turned her skin sticky.
Yet, motivated by stubbornness and Paul’s encouraging words, she went on. She’d find the offering, even without Calla, and
she’d present it to her, like a trophy, a repudiation of Calla’s accusations. See, I am capable, I am fine. I can handle myself, even if you don’t believe in me.
She thought of her father and his brother; of all the things Calla seemed to know about her, that knowledge itself a sort of betrayal; of May and her feeble love, another wounded animal on the floor of the farmhouse.
Once, a therapist with purple-framed spectacles and a calendar of Degas paintings lectured Vivi at length about cycle breaking.
Vivi had stared at the reproduction of a ballerina’s turned-out and beslippered foot, politely giving the impression of attentive
listening, ever the dutiful student. Privately, she wondered what one should do if the cycle was the only thing keeping a
family together.
As she walked toward the ravine, circles came at her in all directions. Bulbous mushroom caps; a spiderweb’s glittering hub;
the sun, pale and pearl-like, hovering between trees. Their mother’s antler ring, left behind on the bureau in Long Xuyên.
Tam had drawn the same sundial in her letter and her journal. What was a sundial but another cycle, an endless circle, spliced
to create meaning?
Finally, Vivi arrived at the end of the path. There, the Old House sat on the edge of the ravine. It was a small and sharp-angled
building with a variegated roof and a single window on either side. The door was missing, revealing a gaping entryway that
made her think of Marcel Allard forcing in the door to the Chateau des Miroirs. Open doors could so often be a sign of violation,
as well as one of invitation.
She balked on the threshold. She could just make out the outlines of the dark interior crawling with vines, scattered with
the carapaces of beetles. Or maybe she imagined those signs of life. After a moment, Vivi walked inside.
The house smelled like everything all at once—rain and mildew, salt and flowers and animal shit. She saw a cabinet eaten by
termites, a rusted table, a cracked pot that might have once held a plant. The moth-ravaged remnants of a once-grand tapestry
clung to a nail on the wall. She ran her fingers under the frayed cotton. Wherever she stepped, clouds of dust released like
sighs.
Vivi slid her hands into drawers, flinching when they touched unfamiliar textures.
A wet tuck here; a scaly nub there. Small creatures had come and gone over the years, dragging with them leaves and berries, like thieves stealing into their hideouts with absconded bounty.
Even in her disgust, she felt a surge of wonder at the relentless passage of time.
No place is ever truly abandoned, not while life is conceivable.
She searched the floorboards and peered into eaves. No sundial. A black feather lay on the floor, dusted over, but still soft
to the touch. Vivi flipped through the books by the single cot in the back room, Tam’s bedroom, where on a high shelf, she found a disintegrating copy of Nightwood. She cradled the book for a moment, then gingerly slipped it into her bag.
Hints of Tam still lingered in the novels, written in French, bearing inscriptions from Justine or Emil; in the empty glass jars still
streaked with paint; in that taut sense of waiting that the house exuded. Places can carry the emotional residue of their
inhabitants, and this house, tattered as it was, had once held its breath in hope.
But now that hope was long gone, and with it, any clue of how Tam’s story ended. After searching the rooms twice over, Vivi was forced to admit that the one artifact she was looking for was
nowhere to be found. There was no hint of a sundial anywhere in the house.
A book! Vivi could have laughed at Paul’s misplaced optimism. All she had to show for herself was a mouthful of mud and a
slew of questions whose answers continued to evade her. Her limbs suddenly felt leaden. She rolled her neck and exhaled.
What had Calla called her? A coward.
She couldn’t be a coward. She’d traveled across the world in pursuit of a mystery. She ran toward the unknown, not away from it. How easy
it would have been to leave Blue Mirror in its overpainted form and continue living her life without another ounce of disruption. But Vivi didn’t do that. She went
seeking. Not that Calla would thank her for any of it.
But even amid her indignant, one-sided defense, something else niggled at her.
Would she have pursued Tam’s mystery if Calla hadn’t pushed her?
Calla and Tu?n had taken her to Rathmore and Arles and now Viet Nam, like leading an unwilling horse to a trough.
How many of her decisions were in reaction to those of someone else—Tu?n, Calla, Wayland—and how many were borne of her own desires?
She was afraid to admit what those could be, because, like Pandora
opening her box, she might risk those very desires consuming her. Or, worse yet, she might be denied all she couldn’t admit
she wanted.
Vivi thought of how Samuel would be opening the email Calla had sent, his expression dropping as he read over Vivi’s words.
His hand would run up to those curls, tugging at the nearest one as he wondered how the woman he loved could have hidden so
much from him. Maybe he’d begin to feel relieved that she’d left, glad that her darkness wouldn’t follow her into Phoebe’s
unwritten young life. Trauma, she’d long suspected, was contagion. It preyed on the healthy, the pure.
Vivi sat on a rotted-wood chair and tried to scrape the dirt from her skin. The tips of her ears itched. Her feet felt as
if they’d never lift from the floor. She wanted to lay down on Tam’s bed and sleep and sleep.
A miasma settled around her, coating the shadows in an ectoplasm of blue. Twilight, maybe, or something more nefarious, a
slow draw of a veil. The jarring shift of colors made her believe she was already dreaming. Maybe when she woke up, she’d
be transported back to the nineteen forties, before any of this had been chiseled into stone.
Now Tam was leaning over her, her hand warm on Vivi’s cheek. Hair threaded with gray, charcoal streaked on her knuckles. A star-shaped
freckle on her cheek.
My light, my lost light.
She was telling Vivi it was time to join her. Tam had something she’d been wanting to give her—yes, her! Vivi just needed to stand and walk. One step in front of the other.
Through the woods. Through the night. Back home, beloved, back home.